Glaciers

I always felt a bit of a fraud when, as a geography teacher, I lectured my students on things about which I had only learned second-hand, from sources such as textbooks, lectures and documentaries. So it was with glaciation, which seemed to pitch up in every English geography curriculum - rightly so, because ice has sculpted much of the landscape of the British Isles. However, in all my thirty years in teaching I had never seen a glacier.

This changed some years after I left the profession, when we started visiting Canada. On our first trip there, in 2006, we saw the Athabasca glacier and, because it is so carefully marked, could follow its dramatic retreat over the last few decades.

Features like corries, icefalls, moraines, crevasses - all carefully labelled in the plethora of worksheets issued to my students - suddenly became alive; and, like everything, they are so, so much more spectacular in reality than one could ever have imagined.

So we have since sailed up fjords and seen glaciers floating and calving; we have seen their blue ice and the dirty layers formed of rock debris prised off the valley floor. We have heard them creak and groan like old men.

We have even flown across ice caps and seen how, at their margins, ice flows in glaciers down to frozen seas, this courtesy of the great circle route from the UK to western Canada passing over Greenland.

So, in retrospect, all I can hope is that at least some of those many students I bored with my expositions on glaciation will get off their butts and go and see a glacier for themselves and, even, point to a feature and exclaim, "Wow! That's a xxxxx! Mr Haylett taught me about them."